Gbenga Akinnage, an actor on HBO’s “The Deuce,” revealed to The New York Times Style Magazine that he has a side business that not many people know about. When he’s not on set shooting, he spends his off-hours reupholstering chairs for his vintage furniture brand called Enitan Vintage.<\/p>\n
As the Times’ Style Magazine popped into his brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, they described what his living room\/stockroom looked like and how he gives these chairs a new life.<\/p>\n
“He restores baroque settees and wingbacks of Western provenance,” they write. He “then re\u2011dresses them primarily using West African Dutch wax fabrics.”<\/p>\n
They also write that while he was looking for some property, he found a lone chair in a basement that he decided to take home. When took a trip to South Africa to film the movie “Detour,” he found the perfect purple fabric to put on his tattered chair. This hobby became a part of his life, then transformed into a business. Anytime he was in a new location, he was looking for fabrics to start a new project. He’s picked up chairs from all over the world from right in the states-\u00a0 Oklahoma, to be specific – to Nigeria.<\/p>\n
Akinnage told the Times, “I\u2019m Nigerian, so everything is just shy of being a business already.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Times also spoke about the deeper meaning of what Akinnage is doing. “Dutch wax fabrics have been accepted as a symbol of African culture since at least the 1960s, but they are, in fact, the product of a long history of colonialism,” they write. “By covering antique British, Danish and French chairs in these materials, Akinnagbe is reappropriating that appropriation.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gbenga Akinnage, an actor on HBO’s “The Deuce,” revealed to The New York Times Style Magazine that he has a side business that not many people know about. When he’s not on set shooting, he spends his off-hours reupholstering chairs for his vintage furniture brand called Enitan Vintage. As the Times’ Style Magazine popped into…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":12777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[72,5,6,3144],"tags":[165,170,103,2644,3235,21,3238,3237,3229,3239],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12776"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12776"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12780,"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12776\/revisions\/12780"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africafashionweek.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}